TIFF Report:  NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN Review

While out hunting in the arid wastelands near the Mexican border, Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) discovers a crime scene involving lots of drugs, a bag of 2 million dollars and a lot of dead Mexicans.  Just smart enough to be really dangerous to himself, he deduces the situation, leaves the drugs, takes the firearms and heads home to his trailer and dim couch-wife Carla-Jean (Kelly Macdonald who is always a treat to watch and makes the most of a small role).  She really does not understand what he has done, despite Llewellyn’s blunt, honest explanation and is eventually shunted out of the picture for the time being while he goes on the run.  It is not long before the psychotic fixer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem, looking all freaky-deaky in a Monkeys haircut and introduced by strangling a police officer to death while handcuffed) is on Llewellyn’s trail.  Along to play clean-up is the melancholy Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones).  Bell acts as the films conscience and observer.  Age Morgan Freeman’s detective from Seven (also a film obsessed with grim detail) another 20 years and bleach him out in the Texas Sun and you get the idea.  Bell is Nostalgic for the old days, even with the unconscious realization that those days were most likely equally violent; the only difference perhaps being that it was a violence he thought he understood.  Certainly it was more fathomable than the indifferent destruction that follows in the wake of Chigurh.  Chigurh with his dead eyes, subtle sense of humour and strict moral code is destined to become one of the screens classic villains. (At the very least he is a villain that could only exist in literature or on screen).

Contemplating whether lives are tossed about more by chance and the winds of change or by conscious decisions.  Perhaps a combination of the two, but the Brothers go out of their way to make them seem futile – folks are going to do what they are going to do (same as it ever was).  Nearly all of the Coen Brothers stylistic discipline is channeled into laying out crime details that would function as a how-to manual if the film was not so intent on showing just how ineffectual each mini-schema plays out for hopelessly outmatched Llewellyn.  He tries to hide his trail from Chigurh who remains undeterred and not even the slightest bit worried.  Inscrutable and compulsively watchable in equal measure this is something that translates perfectly from the pages of Cormack McCarthy’s novel to the screen.  While on the subject of novel and film comparisons, there is some humour injected into the movie to put the Coen’s stamp on the material (it should be noted that the novel reads like a screenplay to begin with).  This comes at the expense of more development of Sheriff Bell whose richer narrative arc is sadly truncated here.  Jones is so good, you wish there was more of him.

Devoid of a musical score, although not necessarily noticeable at the time, it is so crucial to the tone of the film and the effect on an audience that I hope this catches on (it is often used in less accessible art house films but so rare in mainstream cinema).  The silence combined with the emptiness of the landscape reminiscent of the open stretches of lone wandering souls in many of those more meditative westerns.  However, this is also the most violent, and perhaps the darkest film the Brother’s have ever made.  An extraordinarily high body count (including not one, but two dogs) and plethora of pulsating wounds break up silent stretches of the three lead characters (one increasingly desperate, one inexorably grim, and one more or less resigned) play out their part with attention to every minute detail.  It remains unclear if the film actually wants the audience to ponder why we compulsively watch these types of entertainments, and that actually may be the point.